When you play pen and paper RPGs your characters usually spend about 25% slaying monsters (in the sessions i hosted, i made it even less) and 75% talking with people and doing detective work. In the MMORPGs that exist on the market today you spend like 75% slaying monsters and 25% doing other things (which is generally preparing to slay monsters). Granted, monster slaying is fun, but I still think that you could make a awesome MMORPG that has little or no monster slaying. It would be cool if the monsters where hiding somewhere out of reach from most players until they suddenly attacks the cities. If combat was uncommon, this meant a lot of players would have to run for their life, and thoose who slayed the monsters would truly become heroes! So what things could you do instead of monster slaying that are not boring? Well, here are a few ideas to get things started: - In a MMORPG where politics are important, intrigues will arise! If players could gain political positions that meant that they would have actuall control over their province/kingdom/whatever very interesting social situations could arise. Like if there is one player who has a vision of how a kingdom should be run, he could get together with a few other players who has the same ideas as him, create a party and then try to win the election. This leads to a number of cool possiblities. For instance you could have a newspaper, or even cooler, a few rivaling newspapers and then you could have proffesions like journalists. Journalists would try to get interviews with politicans, and famous heroes, and would try not to run like hell when the monsters are attacking to get some good pictures! Players could be in street gamgs, become mafia members or decide that the current politicans are assholes and if enough people agree they could create (or join a allready existant) a guerila! I could probably keep babling forever about cool ideas for a MMORPGs freed from monster slaying, but it would be interesting to hear your input and any cool ideas that you might have! Peace! -EDISON BRIGHT

I absolutely agree!

But (there has to be a "but")...

What''s the reason people play pen&paper rpg?
They want to do adventures, explore unknown terrain and things like this.

So the gamemaster comes up with a plot they have to solve. The players solve it (or find they are incapable doing so) and all had a bunch of fun.

Now the same with MMORPGs.
1000 Player online, all want to be something special, they want to be heros.
With pen&paper you need a DungeonMaster for 10 players (really big group). so for this example MMORPG you need 100 Gamemasters!

And all 100 Gamemasters have to come up with a great storry. Dayly.
A pen&paper group perhaps meed once a week, play for 4-6 hours (or for almost 12 hours like my group did for a while).

Now with 1000 players on 24/7, you need to bring up a new adventure for 1000 players every 12 hours, 100 times more players = 14*100 = 1400 times more the work than for a pen&paper group.

And this with the asumption of a 10 player pen&paper group playing 12 hours (Overestimated for sure).
This is the reason people try to automatize most adventure finding in MMORPGs. And what part of RPG is easiest to automatize?
right, monsterslaying.

I would LOVE to see a MMORPG with the deep of pen&paper, but this will not happen before they find a way to automatize the generation of intriguing adventures.

just my 2 cents.

i always thought the 25% killing stuff and 75% talking is why pencil and paper rpg''s sucked. Its at least half of it i guess.

quote: Original post by Edison Bright
- In a MMORPG where politics are important, intrigues will arise! If players could gain political positions that meant that they would have actuall control over their province/kingdom/whatever very interesting social situations could arise. Like if there is one player who has a vision of how a kingdom should be run, he could get together with a few other players who has the same ideas as him, create a party and then try to win the election. This leads to a number of cool possiblities. For instance you could have a newspaper, or even cooler, a few rivaling newspapers and then you could have proffesions like journalists. Journalists would try to get interviews with politicans, and famous heroes, and would try not to run like hell when the monsters are attacking to get some good pictures! Players could be in street gamgs, become mafia members or decide that the current politicans are assholes and if enough people agree they could create (or join a allready existant) a guerila!

If you implemented some of this, you''d take a lot of the workload off the GM''s. This way, people would be able to make things happen without a gamemaster who has to think up everything. The gamemasters might then from time to time add some other sideplots, to keep things interesting, but with enough freedom, the players should be able to get some stuff going

Feasibility... that''s why MMORPGs are 75% hack and slash and 25% everything else. To build a game that''s 75% social/political and 25% hack and slash is not feasible. Simulating politics is not easy. And anyone that says they can do it or have done it is fooling themselves. It can''t be done well enough to base an entire game around it... not yet anyway, but I guess one can hope.

Sure it can, JD, you just have to have a player controlling every individual in the game!

really, the thing that makes politics and relations crappy in games is AI. With a good GM, you can imbue every goblin with a solid sense of self-preservation and bribability. Attempts to model that through software are valiant, but so far unsuccessful. Maybe it''ll be achieved in the future, but for now all NPCs can really do is sell you stuff or try to kill you, unless a very specific plot-based event is scripted for them.

Iron Chef : Why NPCs? In a MMORPG where there is like a thousand of players there is no reason that all of these players should be adventurers and then the only village people is controlled by AI. I would like most of the players to be villagers, with a few ones being soldiers (say 200-300 soldiers per 1000 players)and only the really skillfull ones of thoose to be real heroes. Naturally the only ones who have to fight are the soldiers. The rest of the players would do other things like sell stuff, hang out in smokey bars, become involved with the politics and so forth. It might sound boring on paper, but then again The Sims sounds awfull on paper, but is one of the most sold games today. Simulating real life in a unreal world sure sounds damn interesting to me. How is it to live in a acapolyptic cyberpunk world or a tolkien style fantasy world.

I realize my idea is probably very hard to put in a real game since it would require the world to be very dynamic and extremely interactive. But just thinking about the cool scenatios that players could create themself (without a GM) if the world is interactive enough sure make me wanna dream of this game.

For example, imagine that a group of players decide to start a gangster like business where they demand that players who own stores in their area pays them some gil/gold/rupees/whatever for protection. They are hugely succesfull and when the rumour is out other players become inspired to do the same thing, resulting in territory war between the gangsters. This causes a lot of trouble for a lot of players (mostly store owners, and people living at the territory borderlines) and finally some of them decides that the current players who are in the government (who might be bribed by the gangster players) are to lazy and are not giving police enough resources to get rid of the gangsters so they starts their own party. Theri party is succesfull and becomes elected. These players wont let themself be bribed so the gnagster players try to get them assassinated. etc etc...

In the above example everyone involved where players (no NPCs), there was no monster hacking and slashing, yet a great deal of interesting things happened.

Killing monsters has definately gotten boring. I don''t know if I can stand leveling up in another game. But that''s what you have to do in order to get to the fun stuff, which for me is pvp.

So far, all the quests I''ve seen have been lame and not worth the time.


Adventuring should be more fun and oriented towards a goal rather than just to gain experience or money.

This is a bit of a wild idea, but...

What about employing gamesmasters? That is, having them on the developer''s staff?

A system of dynamic scripting - so that the gamesmasters can script events for NPCs and then have those events triggered without needing to reload the map in any way.

They wouldn''t have avatars ingame - they''d be pure ''backstage crew.'' If a monster attacked you, you wouldn''t know if it were due to the AI or due to the ''voices in its head...''

It''d be expensive, but if you''re running an MMORPG anyway...

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.

Hrm. Not too sure.

I guess that if the game was designed such that hanging out and growing vegetables was fun, then you''d have a lot of player-controlled villagers and stuff, but really, the only reason there were so many poor, boring people in the middle ages was because the caste system prevented them from doing cool things like leading armies and hunting foxes. The image I''m getting is of a game centered primarily around a bunch of people hanging out in what amounts to a chat room, and someone occasionally coming in to talk about how much ass they just kicked and trying to buy life potions from you.

I suppose that could be cool, but there would have to be some really neat reason to make life potions instead of buying an axe and fighting goblins. Sure, killing beasties in games gets boring, but it''s worlds better than knitting, or making Fine Leather Boots or Rusty Daggers of Venom.

Everybody wants to be a hero. You need a way for a silverswith to distinguish himself. If you actually treat the peasant players as peasants might be treated, then they''re just going to leave. If, however, they can achieve fame, wealth and reknown for growing really terrific rice or making super tasty pies, then you''ll see more people into that sort of thing.

Just basing a game on socialization will only attract people that can''t get that in real life. I play video games when I want to kill stuff and not get in trouble for it, or when I want to fight against things that are obviously evil. If I want to bake, or hang out in a bar, then by God I''ll do it right here in the really real world.